I once had the luck to meet the great Saul Bellow, who in the course of the evening told me the following story. In 1945 he had been engaged as a book reviewer for Henry Luce' Time magazine. Or he thought he had been so engaged. When he turned up for work, he was informed that Whittaker Chambers, chief Pooh-Bah of the 'back of the book', wished to see him. He entered the sanctum and found the stout, surly presence waiting behind a desk. 'Sit down Mr Bellow. Tell me, what did you study at university?' Bellow replied that his study had been English literature. He was asked to give his opinion of William Wordsworth as a poet. He responded that he had always thought of William Wordsworth as one of the Romantics. 'There is no place for you,' said Chambers on hearing this, 'in this organisation.' The future Nobel Laureate was fired before he had been hired. Reflecting on this in 1989, he said he still had two questions about it. The first and unanswerable one was: what if he'd kept the job? He might be a book critic for Time to this very day. The second question was: what answer could possibly have saved him? I thought then, and I think now, that the books editor wanted the junior scribe to look him in the eye and say that William Wordsworth, a one-time revolutionary poet, had seen the error of his ways and - braving the scorn and contumely of his one-time comrades - become a reconciled conservative.

LRB 31 July 1997 | PDF Download